Hunting for stones is often an activity located somewhere between the beauty and the pain. A fossick can be a painful search for beautiful stones, depending on the weather or other circumstances. I arrived at Gemstone Beach at 10 am this morning with Chrissy. It felt very cold, and I didn’t really warm up completely on the beach despite my hat and scarf and heavy coat. Given the cold temperatures (about nine degrees) and especially the bitter wind, we decided not to stray too far from the carpark. Luckily the rain stayed away, moving across to the west of us.
We fossicked only as far as the Taunoa Stream, along maybe 250 metres of the beach – there were good patches of stones on about one-third of this area. There were maybe eight to ten other people there at various times. We left after one and a quarter hours. I took 37 stones away with me. Ten of them are featured below.
This find was the most interesting to me due to the tiny shapes (probably crystals) in it:
A stone with some intense green in it, though its two sides are quite different:
Another two stones with significant green in them:
A mudstone that has come under tectonic pressures which have partially fragmented it:
The red streaks in the next stone caught my eye but there’s other stuff going on in there too:
And I keep finding good quality trace fossil argillite stones – here are four, with the last two having much fainter traces than the first two:
The phrase “Between the beauty and the pain” comes from the lyrics for “Strangest Thing” by The War on Drugs:
Summer ride on a beach
And howl at the day
I’ve been hiding out so long
I gotta find another way
Late at night I wanna see you
Well, my eyes, they begin to fade
Am I just living in the space between
The beauty and the pain
And the real thing
Now the sky is painted
In a wash of indigo
I’ve been holding on too long
In the howling of this cold
Recognise every face
But I ain’t got everything I need
If I’m just living in the space between
The beauty and the pain
It’s the strangest thing
Yeah, should-haves surrounding me
Surrounded by the whole
Surrounded by no other
I wanna ride home
Yeah, I can run slowly
Don’t run away again
Yeah, I can run the stones
Don’t run away again
I wanna run, I wanna run
The next Post in this Series is called “A Horse on Gemstone Beach, An Aircraft Overhead”. For the Series Index, see here.
The cold weather and higher/surge-yer than normal swell was a good excuse to fossick on the carpark side for a change. Ended up with half a bag of goodies to tumble!